[Asis-l] SIGIR 2007 Newsletter for May

Djoerd Hiemstra sigir07 at cs.utwente.nl
Mon May 21 17:22:09 EDT 2007


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                   SIGIR 2007 News letter for May 2007

            The 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference
                       23-27 July 2007, Amsterdam
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In this edition:

  1. Early bird registration before 15 June 2007
  2. Book your hotel as soon as possible
  3. How to obtain an invitation letter for a visa
  4. Complete preliminary conference schedule on-line
  5. Preliminary programme for the SIGIR Industry Event
  6. SIGIR provides excellent tutorials 
  7. TNO-ICT sponsors the SIGIR Industry Event
  8. Fredhopper sponsors SIGIR at the bronze level
  9. Submissions for most SIGIR workshops to close 
 10. Important Dates
 
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1. Early bird registration before 15 June 2007

We received already many registrations for the conference. Early bird
registration is still possible: SIGIR offers reduced registration fee 
if registration and payment is received before 15 June 2007. 
Furthermore, there are reduced fees for members of ACM, BCS-IRSG, ARIA,
FGI, WGI, and SIKS.
Register now on: http://www.sigir2007.org/registration.html

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2. Book your hotel as soon as possible

July is in the middle of tourist season in Amsterdam, so we recommend 
strongly to book early for your visit to the SIGIR 2007 conference.
Online reservations are managed by RAI Hotel & Travel Service. They 
can book a room for you at the conference hotel, the NH Grand Hotel 
Krasnapolsky. If you prefer not to stay there, RAI Hotel & Travel 
Service has carefully selected different hotels in the city centre 
of Amsterdam, at the best rates. We offer hotels for every budget - 
including 4-person rooms at one of Amsterdam's famous youth hostels.
See: http://www.sigir2007.org/accommodation.html

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3. How to obtain an invitation letter for a visa

The conference organisation receives many reguests for invitation 
letters to obtain a visa to travel to the Netherlands. The 
procedure is simple: The registration form has a box to tick if 
you require an invitation letter for a visa. The visa letter is sent 
as soon as you have registered and we have received your payment. 

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4. Complete preliminary conference schedule on-line

The complete perliminary conference schedule is now on-line. Some 
small details might still change, but it gives a complete detailed 
overview of the entire program. 
See: http://www.sigir2007.org/schedule.html

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5. Preliminary programme for the SIGIR Industry Event

The first Industry Event is proud to announce an excellent preliminary 
programme of speakers.

  * Omar Alonso from SAP discusses sensemaking in the enterprise, 
    where the Orcatec LCC speaker presents on legal discovery and 
    litigation support. 
  * Hugh Williams from Microsoft and Byron Dom from Yahoo! will 
    discuss topics in search for end-users. 
  * Vertical search is treated by Thomas Mandl, who assesses 54 
    website search applications, while Craig Scott from Elsevier 
    Scirus explains how web data has been integrated within Scopus. 
  * Daniel Tunkelang from Endeca puts the user experience in the 
    spotlight, where Fredhopper's Ronny Roeller dives into facetted 
    search for e-commerce. 
  * Collexis speaks on thesauri construction in the language 
    technology session, and Jakub Zavrel from Textkernel will talk 
    on information extraction and web mining. 

Our practitioner's panel discusses with the audience their challenges 
in applying search solutions. We expect to finalize the programme 
with more contributions on mobile search, web search and e-commerce. 
See: http://www.sigir2007.org/news/20070512prelimie.html

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6. SIGIR provides excellent tutorials

Tutorials will take place on Monday 23 July at the University of 
Amsterdam. Tutorials take half a day, so you can register for
two half-day tutorials. The following tutorials are offered:

  * Conducting Interactive IR User Studies by Diane Kelly from
    the University of North Carolina
  * Introduction to Web Retrieval and Advertising by Ricardo 
    Baeza-Yates, Andrei Broder, and Prabhakar Raghavan from
    Yahoo Research
  * Introduction to Text Mining by David Lewis of Lewis 
    Consulting 
  * The Probabilistic Relevance Model: BM25 and Beyond by 
    Hugo Zaragoza and Stephen Robertson from Yahoo Research
    and Microsoft Research 
  * Cross-Language Information Access by Jianqiang Wang and 
    Daqing He from SUNY Buffalo and the University of Pittsburgh
  * Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning for IR by Yi Zhang 
    and Rong Jin from UC Santa Cruz and Michigan State University 
  * XML Retrieval: Integrated IR-DB Challenges and Solutions by
    Sihem Amer-Yahia, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Mariano Consens, and 
    Mounia Lalmas from Yahoo Research, University of Toronto, and
    Queen Mary University London
  * Introduction to Recommender Systems by Joseph Konstan from
    University of Minnesota

For more information, see: http://www.sigir2007.org/tutorials.html

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7. TNO-ICT sponsors the SIGIR Industry Event

TNO Information and Communication Technology sponsors the SIGIR 2007 
Industry Event. TNO Information and Communication Technology is a 
unique centre of innovation in the Netherlands. TNO helps companies, 
government bodies and (semi-)public organisations to realise successful 
innovations in ICT. Value creation for clients is TNO's priority, and 
their added value lies in the combination of innovative strength and 
in-depth knowledge. TNO's approach to innovation is integrated and 
practical. Where necessary, TNO also focuses on user-friendliness, 
financial aspects, and business processes. TNO supports the 
implementation process by carrying out technical and market trials. 
TNO is also a specialist in innovation strategy and policy. For more 
information please visit http://www.tno.nl/.

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8. Fredhopper sponsors SIGIR at the bronze level

Fredhopper is the No.1 provider of onsite search & merchandising 
solutions for online business in Europe and behind the scenes of many 
of the largest online businesses. Customers include many of the largest 
online businesses such as B&Q, Neckermann, Quelle, Philips Electronics, 
Littlewoods Shop Direct Group, Thomas Cook, Waitrose and Woolworths. 
Fredhopper has product development centers in Amsterdam and Sofia.
For more information: http://www.fredhopper.com/

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9. Submissions for most SIGIR workshops to close

The purpose of SIGIR workshops is to provide a platform for presenting 
novel ideas in a less formal and possibly more focused way than the 
conference itself. As such, they also offer a good opportunity for 
young researchers to present their work and to obtain feedback from 
an interested community. Workshops will take place on Friday, 27 
July 2007 at the University of Amsterdam. SIGIR offers the following 
workshops:

  * Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval
  * Web Information Seeking and Interaction
  * Plagiarism Analysis, Authorship Identification, and Near-Duplicate 
    Detection
  * Improving Web retrieval for non-English queries
  * Multimedia Information Retrieval
  * Large scale Distributed Systems for Information Retrieval 
  * Information retrieval and applications of graphical models
  * Focused Retrieval 
  * Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech

Some workshops still take paper submissions. For details, see:
http://www.sigir2007.org/workshops.html

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10. Important Dates

End of May 2007:   Submission dead line for most workshops (check the
                   individual workshops web sites via
                   http://www.sigir2007.org/workshops.html)
June 15 2007:      Dead line for early registration with reduced fee.
July 23-27, 2007:  Conference in Amsterdam

Web site:    http://www.sigir2007.org
MySIGIR:     http://my.sigir2007.org
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NewsLetter:  Send SUBSCRIBE <FIRSTNAME> <LASTNAME> to sigir07 at cs.utwente.nl
             (leave the list at any time sending "SIGNOFF SIGIR2007")
Contact:     info at sigir2007.org




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